RESPONSES TO BYRON IN THE WORKS OF THREE NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVELISTS: Carol Anne White A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto @copyright by Carol White, 1997 National tibrary Bibliothèque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. rue Wellington Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 canada Canada The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microfonn, vendre des copies de cette thèse sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de microfiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format électronique. The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fkom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Abetract Responsee to Byron in the Works of Three Nineteenth-Century Novelists: Edward Bulwer, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë Ph-D., 1997 Carol Anne White Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto Andrew Elfenbein's Byron and the Victorians(l995) is a full-length account of Victorian response to Byron and Byronism. This thesis builds upon his work by examining how three nineteenth-century novelists, Edward Bulwer, Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, responded to Byron in their fiction. Edward Bulwer's late Regency Bildunssroman, Pelham, The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828) is an example of Byron's pre-Victorian reception which shows how one Regency novelist inscribed Byronic figures in his fiction. Pelham also dramatizes the problematic conflict between male infatuation with Byronic figures and the Bilduncrsroman impulse. Charles Dickens responded to Byron and Byronism more than two decades later in his Victorian Bildunssroman, David Co~perfield (1849/50). Like the later Bulwer, who was critical of Byronism in Ernest Maltravers(l837) and its sequel, Alice(1838), Dickens showed an ironlc, sometimes satirical detachmeni from Byronism. David Copperfield, however, also reveals Dickens' sense of the disempowering paralysis caused by a lingering nostalgic attachent to Byronic figures. Charlotte Brontë responded much more directly to Byron than her male i contemporaries. Writing satire, not romance, she extensively re-worked Byron's The Corsair in Shirley(1849), treating her Byronic "hero" with a cold detachment that was characteristic of other women novelists such as Mary Shelley and George Eliot. Shirley, with its Monday morning realism, is at once a Childe Harold-like lament and a Thackerayean satire on an age in which heroism seemed impossible. I would like to thank the University of Toronto for providing me with an Open Fellowship for three years. 1 would also like to express my sincere and deep thanks to my supervisor, Prof. F.T. Flahiff, who has been a kind and nurturing mentor, guiding my work for many years, sharing his insights, reading and re-reading my thesis, and spending far more time thinking about Bulwer Lytton than he or 1 ever intended. A special thank you to Tony Burgess, who increased my wariness of Louis Moore. Finally, 1 would like to thank my husband, Paul, who believed in me. For Mum and Dad, who have always shared with me their love of books. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. Chapter One Part One Echoes and Allusions ............... 5 Part Two "The Sentimental Measles": Edward Bulwer and Pelham ........ ............. 33 Chapter Two "An Aching Heart": Charles Dickens and Copperfield ................... 87 Chapter Three Charlotte Brontë's Shirley: The Corsair Seen in the Sober Dam. ....................152 Conclusion ...................... .224 Works Cited ......................231 Introduction This thesis was conceived of before the publication of Andrew Elfenbein's Byron and the Victorians(l995). a full-length account of Victorian response to Byron and Byronism. Like Elfenbein's work, it examines çeveral nineteenth-century authors, it argues for the deeply persona1 nature of their responses, and it emphasizes the importance of literary mediation between Byron and his readers. Unlike Elfenbein's work, however, it is not intended to be a general study of the Victorian response to Byron. Nor does it attempt to provide a chronological survey of Byron's reptation in the nineteenth century. Rather, it extends Elfenbein's work by suggesting that certain nineteenth-century novelists, like Byron's periodical reviewers, were important mediators of Byronism.' Edward Bulwer, for instance, inscribed Byronic figures in his fiction, providing fictional Byronic models for later novelists to imitate and interpret. This thesis also explores Elfenbein's suggestion that male infatuation with Byron was as important as the more infamous female infatuation.' And it supports his claim that the stereotype of women's infatuation with Byronic heroes was just that, a stereotype. Lastly, this thesis challenges conventional forma1 boundaries between poetic and prose narrative. Byron was a poet who influenced novelists. Such as Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë were sensitlve to Byron's poetry and incorporated Byronic 2 images and tropes into their fiction.' The first chapter of this thesis considers specific aspects of Byron's early reception that influenced Victorian novelists, particularly Byron's perceived fraudulence and "mobilité." Since critical discussions of such Byronic figures as Brontë's Rochester have often used the term loosely, this study will also address the problem of the term "Byronic." It considers how the term "Byronic" was used by Byron's contemporaries and by later Victorian writers, and it examines the problernatic nature of twentieth-century usage of the term. Part Two of this chapter turns to Edward Bulwer and his extremely popular Pelham, The Adventures of a Gentleman(1828) as an example of Byron's pre- Victorian reception. Bulwer himself described his gothic hero, Reginald Glanville, as Byronic, an identification which gives historical veracity to the thesis' consideration of later Victorian novels whose Byronism is more subtlely introduced. Chapter Two opens with a discussion of T.8. Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, Victorian male authors who turned away from Byron and Byronism in the 1830's. Their reactions provide a context for the chapter's central consideration of Charles Dickens. Chapter Two also introduces Bulwer's Ernest Maltravers(1837) and its sequel, Alice(1838), Bildunssromane that likely influenced Dickens' treatment of the Byronic in his mid-Victorian Bildunqsroman David Co~perfield(1849-50). Although Bulwer and Dickens show an ironic, sometimes satirical detachment from Byronism, their Bildunssromane show even more dramatically their sense of the disempowering paralysis caused by a lingering, nostalgie attachment to Byronic figures. Chapter Three considers a female response to Byron and Byronism that challenges the stereotype of women's uncritical infatuation with the poet. One of the Brontë sisters was an obvious first choice for such a study, and since Jane Eyre and Wutherinq Heiqhts have been so often discussed, it turns to Charlotte Brontë's Shirley(1849), a realistic Victorian social novel that reads like a satire on Byronism, a cool Monday morning reassessment of Byronic figures. Brontë's methodology is entirely different from Bulwer's and Dickens'. Where they incorporate aspects of Byronism within their romantic fiction, she reworks and plays off The Corsair, finding in Byron's poetry the Law material to express her own artistic vision. Brontë's treatment of The Corsair provides a clue to her attitude. No longer under the conventional, romantic spell of Byronism, she reassesses, scrutinizes and disempowers her hero, even making him the object of comedy and farce. She also adopts a Thackerayan-Don Juanish sceptical voice, and expresses her own Childe Harold-like disillusionment with heros and heroism. Chapter Three employs a different methodology than the previous chapter on Dickens, providing a detailed reading of Shirlev as a reworking of The Corsair. Such elaboration is crucial because of the extent and importance of Byron's poem in the novel, and because the Byronism in Shirley has not been discussed. Endnotes l Elfenbein's account of Byron's Victorian response is underpinned by the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, particularly his The Field of Cultural Production(l993). His focus is on how institutions of cultural production (particularly the periodical press) mediated access to Byron. Victorian authors, he suggests, defined themselves against what they saw Byron as representing, responding particularly to Byron's representation of subjectivity. This thesis expands the concept of cultural mediation by showing the intertextual connection between Bulwer's novels and Dickens' David Copperfield. Elfenbein considers several Victorian writers(Bulwer, Disraeli, Wilde) who were "attracted to the homoerotic aspect of Byron's personality, as they understood itW(70). He expresses his suspicion that "male attraction to Byron was more widespread than surviving evidence